I like my games to be heavy on moral ambiguity, painful moral tradeoffs, ends that might justify means. I like to have NPCs with multiple conflicting motives – not just simple, essentialist alignments, but multiple (sometimes conflicting) agendas. Those are the ingredients of the stories I find interesting.
Enshrining an essentialist morality in mechanics is therefore unsatisfying to me, and often leaves players asking questions I can’t honestly answer, and don’t want to answer anyway because it would make their decisions too easy:
“Is she evil?”
“Well, it depends what you mean by that…”
The human racial move for the Paladin (“What here is evil?”) is therefore a problem. Next time someone makes a character, I propose replacing it with a new one. First cut:
When you pray for guidance, even for a moment, and ask “How much blood has this person spilt or commanded be spilt?” the GM will tell you, honestly.
Another way to handle it would be to have the Paladin’s player define what is “evil”. Ask them. Then use their answer to gauge whether or not the thing/person they’re asking about is, in fact, evil (from their perspective).
In DW, as written, only the player characters have alignment. Nothing in the rules gives an alignment to NPCs or monsters.
So, you can leave the move as-is, and say, every time, “Nothing here is evil”.
I don’t quite go that far, but in my current game, the only things that are evil are certain magic items and extra-planar entities such as gods and demons. It’s not a morality, it’s an existential attribute.
Have you tried Burning Wheel Rob Alexander ?
I am with Christopher Stone-Bush sh
Also yay Burning Wheel.
More to the point, spilling blood as a focus might not really work. You can be a terrible despot queen that never gets her hands dirty. One of the great things about Paladins is that they have that morality. They follow a black and white path.
You could lessen that by not giving them objective good/evil but evil according to their faith. That makes it subjective.
Burning Wheel – oh yeah, that’s a big influence on me. But I doubt I’ll play it again – I don’t feel that the payoff is worth the complexity.
Adrian Brooks that is distinctly not true. There is a whole section about alignment in the DW cosmology that explicitly says every creature in DW has an alignment that guides them.
I mean, yes, the game can be played with alignment only applying to PCs, but that’s not the default.
In one game, I gave very specific answers to that question, and the answer was never a person. “What here is evil?” And I would say “Ashe’s desire to have gold without earning it, and the ghost’s hunger, and something inside you–what is it?”
Alignment in DW comes from its roots in DnD. It is hugely useful because it definitely influences character roleplaying. In PbtA terms it is a rule that “gets players to say interesting things.” Also most people know instinctively what “good” and “evil” is. A useful definition in a fantasy context would be “ascribing inherent value to sentient life, or not”.
Having said that, even if alignment is useful, you definitely do not need it for role playing. My Pitfighter playbook does not have alignment but persona: he can be face or heel, and turn when he chooses.
I realise that postmodern moral nihilism is getting more popular in our culture. It is only natural that RPGs should reflect that.
Carl Gerriets What he said.
This takes the Paladin from a supernatural crime fighter to having insight into blood spilled. They go from finding and eliminating evil to removing those who cause war and death. I’m not sure I like it — and again, the evil sensed by the Paladin can be what they perceive as evil, not what is metaphysically evil.
But those that are the cause might not spill blood themselves…
If you’re going with moral ambiguity, I would drop the Paladin entirely as it’s really designed for a stark good/evil system. You could always replace it with the Templar.
Having moral ambiguity wants to have a Paladin like figure. Because they see everything as black&white the actual contrast will be greater. They try to keep everything in order when this isn’T actually possible. They are tragic figures that enhance the feeling you want. They don’t fight it.
Regardless of how morally ambiguous your world is, the moral calculus applied by the paladin can be simple and might be ‘just’ only if you have their ‘unique perspective’. They actually believe the world is a binary of good/evil because they are stupid that way, but you need to ask them questions about their God and his inflexible belief to find out how they define evil. Ask questions and use answers after all.
I would not call them stupid, even in your head. That goes highly against being a fan of the character. Starting out with that mindset only sets you against that character more then you need to be.
Ezekiel Lake has it. “Is this person good or evil?” can be followed up with the question “what is good and evil?” and then let the shenanigans begin.
The tragedy of the paladin is that they reduce NPCs with multiple conflicting motives into binary categories of good or evil. The interesting thing is that every paladin does it differently.
My DM goal with any paladin is to introduce doubt into their life, to get them questioning their god’s binary categorization of good and evil, because Paladin vs. God is a fun conflict and opens up all manner of DM moves.
A possible solution
Question: Is she evil?
Answer: According to your faith yes
Tim Franzke Change to ‘because they are simple that way’ if you prefer. A binary good vs evil approach is a simple world view in an in unsimple world.
Moral ambiguity that is built on top of essential morals tend to be more interesting fictionwise than moral nihilism.
You can save somebody, but only one can come. The 6 year old girl or the cancer researcher?
Giving a player moral choices in a relativistic moral environment is senseless. In the above example the player may simply state, neither since my moral imperative is my own survival. In a following encounter he will simply choose the opposite, depending on expediency.
One definition of “a game” is “a series of hard choices in a simulated environment leading to significant outcomes for that environment.” This is true for chess or freeform LARPing.
The problem with relativistic morals in RPGs is that it diminishes fiction by making hard moral choices less hard, or removing them all together.
Having a world built on moral nihilism or relativistic morals may be intetesting but it will ultimately make the game poorer.
My $0.02.
Wynand Louw While I agree that moral relativism can be a poorer experience, I don’t think it must be. Relativistic morality doesn’t necessarily indicate strict pragmatism, that’s a false equivalence. Nor does it indicate nihilism. Rather, moral relativism merely indicates there isn’t an objective standard — that is, the Paladin may feel very strongly about right and wrong, as may the Druid. They may both have reasons. But, if they disagree and there is not an objective standard, then we have moral relativism.
I hate to sound like a first year philosophy student (which I am very much am NOT), but this is sort of covered in the Euthyphro.
By the way, I love any game discussion where mentioning of Plato actually makes sense. 🙂
William Nichols one could easily get side tracked and start discussing philosophy on a story game forum ☺ which would be unacceptible. But then as some story gurus tell us, stories don’t immitate life, they are life.
(I equated moral relativism with moral nihilism for a very specific and rational reason. But that is for another forum)
And as far as Plato is concerned, look no further than your dice…
The Paladin is a Holy Warrior, right? Like, they’re agents of their god(s). There’s your absolute morality right there – how does their deity or pantheon, the one they get their power from, the one answering the question, define evil?
Vel Ziliuse I take this to the logical extreme. Instead of alignment, we call it Allegiance- Each paladin follows a god, and that god has allies and enemies among the pantheon. “What is evil?” therefore returns what your god thinks of as evil- which may not be perfectly moral. Our gods of Death and Hope have a running feud, but it’s understood that followers of one or the other might not be evil in the strictest sense- just on the opposite team.
(with apologies to everyone)
Skyler Crossman understood by whom? The gods, or the Paladins? Is good good because the god’s love it, or would it still be good if the god’s were not there? And do we need anyone to tell us these things?
(again, apologies to everyone.)
Thanks all for your suggestions – there’s lots of potential there. I suspect I may take the easy route from the above and (next time someone’s making a PC) swap out the Paladin in favour of the Templar. It fits with my general drift away from D&D – although I like DW’s AW roots and the new ideas its brought, D&D has never been where my heart is.
(I’ll seriously think about using the Priest and Magician that came in the set with the Templar – again, they’re interesting to me in a way the D&D-like classes aren’t)
Reading over the discussion above, one thing that I’m very conscious of is that the players are all adults, and I am not a moral authority able to make moral judgements for them. I don’t, therefore, want to take a game role that tries to make me that. “What here is evil?”, in its most obvious interpretation, pushes the DW GM to take such a role.
I want the players to judge the NPCs, and the PCs too, just like they’d judge a character in a book or film. I will judge them both, but only as another player, not as an authority. None of us have perfect information about any of the characters – we only know what they did, not what they would have done in every situation. Making those judgements is a big attraction of the game for me. It’s the literary part, if you like. Reifying alignments – making them something that’s real in the game world – detracts from that.